Visa program used as gateway to H-1B saw numbers surge

1of2Between 2004 and 2016, some 7,300 UC Berkeley graduates of a program called Optional Practical Training remained in the Bay Area, according to a new report.Photo: Liz Hafalia / The Chronicle

2of2Thousands of graduates of major Bay Area universities like Stanford (whose Red Hoop Fountain is pictured here) have stayed in the region and worked through a relatively unknown visa program that allows foreign students to work in the U.S. after they graduate.Photo: Leah Millis / The Chronicle 2016

A relatively unknown visa program, often used as a path to an H-1B visa but under scrutiny from the Trump administration, saw a surge in usage between 2004 and 2016, a new report found.

The Optional Practical Training program grants foreign students a period of time to work in the U.S. after they graduate. Nearly 1.5 million graduates of U.S. colleges and universities — including many in the Bay Area — used the program during the 12-year period studied, according to a report released Thursday by the Pew Research Center.

The data offer a detailed picture of a program that critics say is abused by U.S. employers, but advocates say is crucial for retaining highly skilled workers.

“Most people don’t know about OPT, but it’s a giant gateway into the H-1B program,” said Ashwin Sharma, an immigration attorney.

In 2016, about 257,000 used the OPT program, up from about 78,000 in 2004. During that period, the program had nearly the same number of participants as the H-1B program, which allows employers to sponsor a foreign citizen to live and work in the U.S. for a period of time.

The number of program recipients with science, technology, engineering or math degrees increased particularly quickly. Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama oversaw extensions that respectively gave STEM students first 17, then 24, extra months to stay. (The standard program, created in 2003, offered 12 months.) Between 2008 and 2016, the number of OPT holders with a STEM degree rose by 400 percent.

Experts widely expect the Trump administration to do away with the extension period, which essentially gives STEM students an extra two shots at getting an H-1B visa — one for each additional year. Last year, the administration indicated in its list of regulatory priorities that it plans to reform the practical training program in an effort to protect American jobs.

Without these extensions, many international graduates would have to leave the country shortly after graduation if they are not picked in the H-1B lottery, where 85,000 job candidates from abroad are chosen randomly a year.

San Francisco resident Alejandro Castillejo, for example, would already be gone.

Castillejo, a 25-year-old graduate of UC Berkeley and creative technologist at Propelland, a San Francisco design studio, wasn’t chosen in the H-1B lottery last year. But because he has the STEM extension, he was able to try again this year.

But if he isn’t chosen this year, and luck betrays him a third time in 2019, he’s content with the fact that he’ll have three years of U.S. work experience under his belt. “I’m able to work three years in Silicon Valley, which is exactly where I want to be,” said Castillejo, who is from Spain. “The first three years are crucial to define your career path, so it’s good to have it ... particularly after making a big investment in a university.”

Neil Ruiz, an associate director of global migration and demography at the Pew Research Center and an author of the report, said the data were intended to show the significance of the program to the U.S.

“If there are going to be any policy changes, we just wanted to get the facts out,” Ruiz said. “It is interesting for us to understand, especially with graduation season, where they are going and moving within the U.S.”

The Bay Area had the second-largest concentration of OPT recipients within the period studied (after New York), and the largest number of people in the program moving to the region for work. Local tech companies — ranging from those as big as Facebook to startups — often rely on people from abroad to fill highly skilled positions.

Ira Mehlman, spokesman for the Federation for American Immigration Reform, which advocates for limited immigration, said the sheer number of people using the foreign work program should turn heads.

“If you combine the number of OPT participants and H-1B visas, some 3 million desirable, career-building jobs in the U.S. are unavailable to American workers,” he said.

He said that some universities shut down for being “visa mills” — a term used for institutions that have poor education standards but lure foreign students on the promise of a U.S. visa — have churned out a significant number of OPT holders.

“A lot of these employment-based programs turn into things that they were never intended to be,” Mehlman said. “In this case, it has been a back-door way for certain businesses to get access to the foreign labor they want — or for these visa mills posing as educational institutions to cash in on it.”

Silicon Valley University in San Jose, which recently lost its accreditation and shut down, had 4,500 graduates on OPT over the period studied, according to the report; Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Chuck Grassley, R-Iowa, mentioned it on a list of “highly suspect schools” in a memo in March.

Other local universities highlighted in the Pew report have also had run-ins with regulators.

Herguan University in Sunnyvale, whose former CEO was sentenced to prison in 2015 over student visa fraud, had 1,000 graduates who received OPT.

Northwestern Polytechnic University in Fremont had 11,700 OPT graduates in the time period studied, the report said. Last month the Accrediting Council for Independent Colleges and Schools sent the university, which is seeking to renew its accreditation, a notice of a “compliance warning.”

Thousands of graduates of major Bay Area universities have stayed in the region and worked through the OPT program. From UC Berkeley, 7,300 OPT graduates between 2004 and 2016 remained in the Bay Area, according to the report. Stanford had 4,500 OPT grads stay in the area over that time period — and many more from those institutions would certainly have dispersed to jobs elsewhere in the country.

The OPT program, says Sharma, the immigration attorney, fills a “massive skills gap” in the U.S. But it’s also vulnerable, he said, because the STEM extension was not created through Congress.

Trisha Thadani is a City Hall reporter for The San Francisco Chronicle. She previously covered work-based immigration and local startups for the paper’s business section.

Thadani graduated from Boston University with a degree in journalism. Before joining The Chronicle, she held internships at The Boston Globe, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, and was a Statehouse correspondent for the Worcester Telegram & Gazette.